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“I

cannot forecast to you the action of

Russia,” said Winston Churchill in a

1939 radio broadcast. “It is a riddle wrapped

in a mystery inside an enigma.” His famous

formulation might well have been applied to

Dmitri Shostakovich, that nation’s most ex-

ceptional composer at the time, rivaled in

posterity only by Sergei Prokofiev.

Few composers have been debated with

the fervor that has been applied to Shos-takovich in recent decades; indeed, one wishes

that differences of opinion about the man and

his music might be shared without the ran-

corous invective that has unfortunately come

to characterize Shostakovich-related musicol-

ogy. At least it may be said that the divergent

opinions scholars have proposed about him

arise from an unusual density of uncertaintiesabout what lies at the heart of his music. Lis-

tening to Shostakovich provokes a sense that

some message has been deeply encoded in the

music, and it can be frustrating to suspect that

the meaning cannot be entirely unraveled.

The composer spent most of his career

falling in and out of favor with the Commu-

nist authorities. By the mid-1940s his

official approval ratings had soared, plum-

meted, soared again, plummeted again, and

soared anew. In 1945 his stock crashed yet

another time when the Ninth Symphony

struck Soviet bureaucrats as insufficiently re-

flecting the glory of Russia’s victory over the

Nazis. By 1948 Shostakovich found himself

condemned along with a passel of composer

colleagues for “formalist perversions and an-

tidemocratic tendencies in music, alien to the

Soviet people and its artistic tastes” (as the

Zhdanov Decree phrased it). He responded

with a pathetic acknowledgement of guilt,

Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99

Dmitri Shostakovich

IN SHORT

Born: September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg,

Russia

Died: August 9, 1975, in Moscow, USSR

Work composed: 1947–48; not published until

1956, with possible revisions in the interim;

dedicated to David Oistrakh

World premiere: October 29, 1955, Leningrad

Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky, conductor,

David Oistrakh, soloist

New York Philharmonic premiere: December

29, 1955, Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor, David

Oistrakh, soloist; this performance marked the

U.S. premiere

Most recent New York Philharmonic

performance: November 27, 2012, Andrey

Boreyko, conductor, Frank Peter Zimmermann,

soloist

Estimated duration: ca. 37 minutes

and the next year redeemed himself with The

Song of the Forests, a nationalistic oratorio that

gained him yet another Stalin Prize, backed

by 100,000 rubles.

After Stalin’s death, in 1953, the Soviet

government stopped bullying artists quite so

much, but by then Shostakovich had grown

indelibly traumatized and paranoid. He re-

treated to a somewhat conservative creative

stance and until 1960 contented himself withwriting generally lighter fare, keeping his

musical behavior in check as if he suspected

the Soviet cultural thaw to be simply an illu-

sion that might reverse itself at any moment.

JANUARY 2014 | 33



34 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

From the Digital Archives: The Cold War and the Concerto

In the fall of 1955 there was a momentary warming in Cold War relations between the United States and the

Soviet Union. Although the respite didn’t lead to a resolution of fundamental political issues, it did open the

door for some of the leading Russian artists of the day to travel to the U.S. for the first time. One of those was

the great violinist David Oistrakh, who would join the New York Philharmonic as the soloist for the U.S.

Premiere of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in December of that year. The concerto, written for and ded-

icated to Oistrakh, had only been performed twice before,

both times in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with the

Leningrad Philharmonic.

The question of which orchestra would get the honor of the

first U.S. performance was still up in the air when the violinist

arrived in America that November. Oistrakh was scheduled to

perform with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston

Symphony Orchestra before his New York Philharmonic

debut. The original plan was for the Shostakovich concerto to

be premiered in Philadelphia, but a last-minute programchange bumped the work from the program — for reasons of

“insufficient rehearsals.” On December 4 the Philharmonic

sent out a press release announcing that Music Director Di-

mitri Mitropoulos would conduct the work in three concerts

at the end of the month, and that a studio recording would be

made immediately following the performances.

Years later, New York Philharmonic violist Leonard Davis

recalled: “Oistrakh didn’t speak a word of English, and he was

always surrounded by Soviet security people when he came

to rehearsals and even off stage at the concerts. He had a big,round, rolling sound that we had never heard before … with

great technical control and much heart.”

Critic Miles Kastendieck of the New York Journal-American,

agreed, writing:

Sedgwick Clark — who produced the Philharmonic 10-CD

set titled The Historic Broadcasts 1923–1987, which included the live radio broadcast of the program with

Oistrakh — compared that performance with the Orchestra’s studio recording of the work, saying it served as

a prime example of the sparks that can ignite in a live performance, for one can sense both the Orchestra

and its audience on the edges of their seats as the two principals tighten the screws from the first note to

last. Their studio recording for Columbia a day later, while undoubtedly distinguished, can’t touch the in-spired intensity and excitement of this one-time only, single-take performance.

To listen to an excerpt of the radio broadcast of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto scan

here and click the audio icon or go to the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives,

archives.nyphil.org, made possible through the generous support of the Leon Levy Foun-

dation. To listen to the audio online in the Digital Archives, search for the January 1, 1956

program and click on the audio icon.

Violinist David Oistrakh with Philharmonic Music Director Dimitri Mitropoulos (top) and cover art for the recording made with the Orchestra (bottom)

in the cadenza bridging the third and fourth movements,

[Oistrakh] displayed mastery enough to make any violinist

breathless and then matched Shostakovich in the scintil-

lation of the finale. Mitropoulos and the orchestra didmuch more than play along with Oistrakh. They excelled in

their own way.



JANUARY 2014 | 35

In 1960, however, his Seventh and Eighth

String Quartets launched a “late period” of

productivity that would include many no-

table works of searing honesty.

Shostakovich wrote his Violin Concerto

No. 1 in 1947–48 and assigned it the opus

number 77, which accurately depicted where

the piece fell in his output. But the Violin

Concerto No. 1 is universally identified as his

Op. 99, which corresponds to its belated pub-

lication in 1956. What occasioned the delay?

Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich blamed it on the

violinist David Oistrakh. “I despised Oistrakh,”

he told the Shostakovich scholar ElizabethWilson, “because the brilliant violin concerto

written for him in 1948 was allowed to lie

around waiting for its first performance.… To

my mind this was shameful and cowardly.” Yes,

well … the amount of finger-pointing that

went on after the fact in Soviet musical circles

was staggering and sometimes offensive. A

complete account would not neglect to men-

tion that the piece was completed on the

heels of the Zhdanov Decree, the authoritar-

ian slapdown that got Shostakovich fired

from the faculty of Leningrad Conservatory.

That Shostakovich himself might well have

had qualms about releasing such a piece at

that moment must at least be entertained as a

possibility. The fact is that Oistrakh provided

considerable advice on the crafting of the

solo part, did see the piece through its pre-

miere, and, furthermore, was honored by the

composer through the score’s dedication.

Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling

piccolo), three oboes (one doubling English

horn), three clarinets (one doubling bass clar-

inet), three bassoons (one doubling contra-

bassoon), four horns, tuba, timpani, tam-tam,

tambourine, xylophone, celeste, two harps,

and strings, in addition to the solo violin.

Witness to the Premiere

In March 1948 the violinist and composer Venyamin Basner, then 23 years old, attended Shos takovich’s last

class at the Leningrad Conservatory, during which the composer “played for us for the very first time his newly

finished violin concerto.” Basner reported:

Dmitri Dmitriyevich asked if I wouldn’t mind trying something out on the violin. Shaking like a leaf, I got my

violin out. The very idea, that I should be the first violinist to attempt to play this difficult music, and, what’s

more, to sight-read it in the presence of the composer! … The Concerto is a relentlessly hard, intense piece

for the soloist. The difficult Scherzo is followed by the Passacaglia, then comes immediately the enormous

cadenza which leads without a break into the finale. The violinist is not given the chance to pause and take

breath. I remember that even Oistrakh, a god for all violinists, asked Shostakovich to show mercy. “Dmitri

Dmitriyevich, please consider letting the orchestra take over

the first eight bars in the finale so as to give me a break,

then at least I can wipe the sweat off my brow.”

Immediately Dmitri Dmitriyevich said, “Of course, of

course, why didn’t I think of it?” By the next day he had

made the necessary correction by giving the first state-ment of the theme in the finale to the orchestra. The violin

soloist comes in with the passagework afterwards.

Dmitri Shostakovich (left) with violinist David Oistrakh, ca. 1972

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